We are currently doing 10man normal 12/14 (so close to 13/14 but server went down at a bad time). I've been ranking regularly on fights like Iron jug and Sha of Pride where I can tunnell the boss and nail my rotation. Last night we got our first Siegecrafter kill after a few attempts. I was put on the boss full-time and on our actual kill, I felt I had nailed it. Rune seemed to proc at good times and I almost always got a rip, rake and thrash up during the proc. On top of this I managed to pot and get a runed rip up for the Blood in the Water phase which I kept rolling till the end of the fight.

I've never had a fight where I felt everything had gone so well and I had played as well. Then from the log I see that I got less than 85% of the DPS required to rank! I am fully aware that the ranking is pointless etc, but it has me wondering if there is something others are doing that would increase their DPS? Is there a buff you get on the conveyor belts that I miss being on the boss fulltime?

I am very happy with the DPS I did and all my uptimes are good, just wondering why others seem to do so much better on that fight than me compared to say Sha of Pride.

Think I just worked out some of the problem. We had one conveyor belt failure so the boss got the 90% damage reduction shield on him for a while. Not sure if that is all of the issue but it certainly would have hurt my DPS.

Wow - considering I am still comfortably above the next DPS (mage) it shows how shitty this fight is for the ranged I spent a few attempts trying to heal before we switched to our shammy 3rd healer instead and found it quite annoying trying to keep everyone in range with all the crap on the ground....

There is a bug report on their forum but no response from those in charge - which frankly seems pretty normal for WoL. A lot of bugs get ignored - we went almost a whole patch with all tortos fights being invalid because they didn't make an easy fix after Blizz reduced the health of the boss in a patch.

Having said that, if this is affecting the top guilds in heroics then it may get quicker attention.

I've just signed up and a quick thorn in my eye was the lack of a "splitting tool" for big logs and being unable to search for logs per spec (also didn't find a way to submit a search query in the site's header).

Alpheus wrote:I've just signed up and a quick thorn in my eye was the lack of a "splitting tool" for big logs and being unable to search for logs per spec (also didn't find a way to submit a search query in the site's header).

Site is basically pre-alpha, so there is still a whole lot to do. You can track what isn't there/planned at:

To answer your question about splitting, deletion/archival will be supported in the client, but not splitting. Splitting and editing of fights will be supported server-side though, so you will be able to trim or split logs once they are up on the server.

Alpheus wrote:I've just signed up and a quick thorn in my eye was the lack of a "splitting tool" for big logs and being unable to search for logs per spec (also didn't find a way to submit a search query in the site's header).

Site is basically pre-alpha, so there is still a whole lot to do. You can track what isn't there/planned at:

To answer your question about splitting, deletion/archival will be supported in the client, but not splitting. Splitting and editing of fights will be supported server-side though, so you will be able to trim or split logs once they are up on the server.

The problem with server-side splitting is that if I don't do a live log I'll end up with a 4-5gig WoWCombatlog.txt and sending it over the wire just so I can discard 99% of it seems rather unfriendly. The WoL Client has performance problems even opening the log, let alone send it. A much-appreciated feature would be a tail-parser where you could just tail a log and the client would open it back-to-front and stopping at the first 3-4hour gap in events.

WoL has been down this road and I really see no reason doing all these mistakes all over again.

That's because it lets you pick a range. That's the exact reason it has performance problems. It has to get the whole file into memory and then show you a DPS graph to let you pick a range. My client just reads the entire file in pieces and uploads in chunks. This lets me scale to arbitrarily large file sizes.

Anyway, I could probably implement auto-splitting based off a time threshold (e.g., an hour between two combat events), but my client scales to arbitrary size files right now precisely because I don't scan and hold the whole thing in memory like WoL's client does. Auto-splitting is something I could do without having to read the whole file into memory though.

That's because it lets you pick a range. That's the exact reason it has performance problems. It has to get the whole file into memory and then show you a DPS graph to let you pick a range. My client just reads the entire file in pieces and uploads in chunks. This lets me scale to arbitrarily large file sizes.

Anyway, I could probably implement auto-splitting based off a time threshold (e.g., an hour between two combat events), but my client scales to arbitrary size files right now precisely because I don't scan and hold the whole thing in memory like WoL's client does. Auto-splitting is something I could do without having to read the whole file into memory though.

That's a fair point. However, if you want to send the entire log you should no doubt compress it, in which case you end up dumping it into memory either way (even though you might use streaming compression). Not to mention that there should be some way of preserving the log after the upload without causing the log file to grow (ie. archive and delete).

Alpheus wrote:That's a fair point. However, if you want to send the entire log you should no doubt compress it, in which case you end up dumping it into memory either way (even though you might use streaming compression).

A report in Warcraft Logs is divided into a master table of actors and abilities and then a bunch of compressed chunks that represent the event data for fights. In a live log, each fight is basically in its own chunk. This means when you want to look at a particular fight, all Warcraft Logs has to load is the master table and the chunk for that fight.

From a client perspective, this means I send up compressed chunks one at a time as I process the file. This means there is effectively no limit to the size of log files I can process. Obviously there's a point where operations on the server could take too much time (e.g., if you uploaded 1000 wipes and forced me to fetch 1000 segments, but in practice this just doesn't happen).

Alpheus wrote:Not to mention that there should be some way of preserving the log after the upload without causing the log file to grow (ie. archive and delete).

@Kihrawr: if you're a bit more advanterous with warcraftlogs and hoping to disrupt the market to get a large userbase after the next expansion then perhaps long sought-after non-WoL features would be a real kicker in that department. Listing a few off the top of my head in hopes to spark some discussion and find some support:

Armory snapshotting like WoWprogress does (you already know where the characters are coming from by the uploader's realm) so you could have historical records on a guild's performance per item progression. You won't be able to get all the gear snapshotted for a log however, since people swap around faster than they log out but it would still be useful to have a general "estimate" about a guild's ilvl at the time a log is posted.

This expansion had a heavy emphasis on trinket procs and if the expansion wouldn't be at our door steppes I'd probably request a feature to quickly highlight trinket procs on the main graph (either or both). This could of course be made slightly future-proof by...

Expression Editor similar to the one on WoL but with the possibility of saving certain templates to your user account and perhaps even plotting some dimension of the expression's result on the main screen

WoL currently has a pretty week detection for interupts. It would be handy to have an aggregate show all the interupts, stuns, silences and aborted NPC spells for a given time period.

One of the main sports and attractions on WoL is the ability to rank on certain fights. It would be amazing if there would be a greater variety of granularities (ie. by talents + spec, or role tank/melee/ranged) and to allow the community to flag certain invalid or abusive reports or highlight really good ones.

Alpheus wrote:Armory snapshotting like WoWprogress does (you already know where the characters are coming from by the uploader's realm) so you could have historical records on a guild's performance per item progression. You won't be able to get all the gear snapshotted for a log however, since people swap around faster than they log out but it would still be useful to have a general "estimate" about a guild's ilvl at the time a log is posted.

I've been working on something like this for Catus in the background. Mainly, I'm kind of interested in my own gear progression over time. I figure I can add an armory history for all druids relatively easily. I have a binary version of Catus's Compact Gear representation, which can store any gear in a handful of few bytes, which makes storing a few thousand armory per player very reasonable.